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Recording

Hello! BACK ONCE AGAIN! It’s been a considerably long time since I updated this blog, so apologies for that. I’ve got a number of recordings tucked away from the past few months, so hopefully I might post them in the near future. For now, here’s a cool one I recorded this weekend.

It’s another rowing boat! yipee!

Apparently rowing is something my family do on a relatively frequent basis. Second time in the last 12 months we’ve done it. Becoming frankly quite habitual. Anyway, this time it was a plastic-fiberglass body – as opposed to the lovely wooden bodied boat I recorded last year. It still had an interesting sound, nice creaky wooden oars and that pleasing water-on-hull sound that we’ve come to expect from water based vehicles.
I recently (finally) invested in a rycote, which is something I didn’t have the luxury of using the last time I recorded a boat. This time the results are better – but still wind persisted to be an issue.

Here’s a little clip:

That is it for now! Hopefully i’ll be back again soon with more recordings. This project is lasting significantly longer than I had initially anticipated, so I may put some effort into recording more during the summer months to make sure I finish it up.

Hello! Back once again, with some cool sounds that I recorded over Christmas. During the Christmas break, I spent some time on a fairly isolated farm, in the north of Yorkshire, with my family. I brought my recorder with me, anticipating some cool stuff on the farm and in the area, that I could be able to record. I wasn’t disappointed! I’ve edited a few of the cool moments up and i’ll talk in detail about them below.

Where we stayed had this HUGE old barn, which we were allowed access to. It was full of farm junk, and I recorded much of the stuff I found in there. Two recordings I made that really stood out to me as having a very cool sound, were those of the huge wooden barn doors, and some heavy metal chains I found; The barn door was massive, probably three times my height and made of heavy wood. It was locked, so I couldn’t slam it properly, but I manipulated it by pushing it outwards slightly and letting it fall back on to the frame. The recordings are below, I recorded from two perspectives: close, and medium.

The close perspective recordings have a lot of weight and detail of the wood in, and a lot more low end and a higher signal to reverb ratio. The medium distance is much more verby, and they also have a lot more body and force to them. I always used to try and minimize the amount of reverb I captured in comparison to source when field recording, but I’ve really grown a taste for it recently. I have been using the ‘Mechanism’ library by Tim Prebble / HISS and a ROAR a lot recently, and much of the bigger machines in that library have a lot of dense natural reverb on them, from the space in which they were captured, that I absolutely love. I’ve found that natural reverb provides a really lovely colour and flavour when mixed in with other elements in my designs. I want to make an effort to capture stuff with more of its natural verb response as a more prominent feature in the future.

I also recorded some huge metal chain in the barn, and they again were washed with a lot of the huge natural reverb that the space provided. I found the chain contained a lot of harsh harmonic elements that, despite not being very ‘loud’, caused my recorder to peak a lot. I balanced the gain to capture a level recording of the source, but lost some of the reverb a higher gain setting would have allowed me.

Next is something really special. One of the nights there was a huge storm, with incredibly powerful winds that rocked the whole farmhouse we were staying it. I noticed the wind propagating around the cracks of the doors, and when it really picked up speed, it produced this incredible howling wind sound – really like nothing i’ve ever heard before. It was the cliche howling wind we know so well from films – so I grabbed my recorder and captured as much of it as I could.
The wind sound was actually incredibly quiet, and I had to push my recorder to the limits of its settings to get a good signal. This, sadly, produced a bit of a hissy noisefloor – that thankfully can be taken out fairly easily in RX. It’s surprisingly impressive how subtle the noise introduced at the highest gain settings actually is – another reason why I love the DR-100.

Next I spent a bit of time recording ambience at the top of a very tall hill. Here’s a cool picture:

The recording is interesting, and most of it is the typical birds / wind etc you’d expect, but I’ve picked out a small section to upload which I thought had some interesting elements; I captured a lot of the typical wildlife you’d expect from such a locations, birds, a dog barking etc. I caught a very interesting bird call (at around 10 secs in), and while I was recording a runner passed me – and created a very interesting doppler effect, with her shoes passing the microphone. Usually having human sounds in my ambience recording is very irritating, but i thought the nature of this sound was of some note due to its interesting capture.

Lastly, I spend some time in a lovely, dense wooded area, and captured some of the ambience of the space. It’s a fairly typical woodland ambience; wind in the trees, birds etc. There’s also the distant gunfire of hunters in another part of the forest, and the faint sound of a prop-plane going by overhead.

I decided to – mostly for practical reasons – record without monitoring. This is something i’ve read about a few other field recordist’s doing, and I thought i’d give it a try. For me, it presented a few positives; I moved fairly far away from the recorder and left it running. Usually I will sit near the recorder, and in the past that has resulted in occasionally hearing me sniff or fidget in the recording (i’m awful at sitting still). It also forced me to actively listen back to the recording after the fact, in order to label it properly.

So, that’s the lot for now. I’ll be back soon hopefully with more cool stuff. I haven’t been able to record as much as i’d like to recently, largely due to me settling into a new job and new house, but also because i don’t have one of those driving machine thingies (or even a license to pilot a driving machine), and as such my recording potential is stifled somewhat. Moving forward I’d like to record more, as it’s a wonderful feeling to design sounds with content you’ve actually recorded, so hopefully i’ll make more of an effort to do more soon.

So tonight, there was an absolutely huge thunderstorm in the Manchester-ish area. It was huge, chucked it down with rain and huge rolls of thunder battered the north-west coast. It was so damn big, it made the news. I was still at work when I heard a huge thunder crack, so I rushed home, grabbed my recorder and captured what I could.

It rained heavily for about an hour, with constant thunder and lighting throughout. At one point (and I kid you not), lighting stuck something outside my room. I’m not sure what exactly it struck, or how close to me it actually was, but it was damn loud. Sadly i’d turned my recorder off by that point. (doh).

I put my recorder by my window (I did think about running out into the rain and crouching somewhere with the recorder, but after a little deliberation, I decided I wasn’t that bothered about soaking myself to get a great recording). The result of it being by the window is some slightly weird reflections, but it sounds okay. The thunder is a relatively broadband noise anyway, and it shows up well despite the un-ideal mic positioning. Here’s a few exciting moments below:

That’s the lot for now! Forgot to take pictures.. So I used one from the other week when I recorded some rain from my window. Rain’s all the same.

Hello! Just a quick one, posting some audio I recorded a few months ago now that I really need to do something with. I have had an incredibly fun and exciting month or so, and all will most likely be explained in the next blog. But for now, here’s some cool bits I recorded while I was at home in summer!

So a friend of mine owns a 1000cc Honda CBR and a fancy Jaguar, and and considering these aren’t necessarily vehicles I might have everyday access to, I decided to grab some quick recordings. I was very limited in my equipment choices at this point, and considering the source, I probably could have gone for a far better setup – but I figured i’d make use of what I had to hand. I had my two portable recorders – the tascam DR-05 and DR-100, which I used to capture the bike and car from different perspectives. I recorded both vehicles whilst stationary, so I was able to carefully place the recorders in the best positions to capture a good sound.

For the Honda, I put the DR-05 by the exhaust, and the DR-100 right next to the engine itself. The bike was incredibly loud – louder than i’d anticipated – and the pre-amps got a bit battered. The recording didn’t necessarily distort, but it did.. saturate, a little. You can hear the force of the exhaust pumping the diaphragms in the DR-05 mics in the recording below, with the engine mic mixed in also. Despite having some wind protection on the mics too, they still struggled a bit under the weight of the air and sound waves being produced by the bike. This is raw from the recorder, and may also be a little loud.

Next was the Jaguar, an XF. The sound wasn’t actually that amazing, as it turned out to be more of a luxury car, rather than any kind of sport type thing. I still set my mics up and recorded the engine, and got some cool results.

I put the DR-100 on the engine, and the DR-05 on the exhaust. The car wasn’t as loud as the bike, but it still had some give to it. I combined the two positions together and cut out two little clips to demonstrate different engine states, below. These are raw from the recorder.

Hello! So I’ve just got back from spending a week in Manchester, and despite my initial intentions, I ended up being too busy to do much recording. As I had some time to kill on my way home, and my recorder in my bag, I decided to grab a recording of the ambience of the main train station in Manchester, Manchester Piccadilly. It’s fairly big – not huge – but enough for a busy sounding ambience, with the trains in the background and the tannoy overhead.

I initially sat next to some old people who proceed to chat loudly about a movie their daughter had been to see, but after moving to a slightly less populated area I was able to capture some cool ambience of the space as a whole. I decided to avoid being particularly obvious with the recorder, and tucked it in the front pocket of my bag with just the mics poking out of the top.

The sound is pretty cool, definitely usable as a background ambience – not very much spill from the trains, a little rumble but mainly just a non-descript ambient bed. As always this is raw from the recorder, no processing other than the edit.

That’s it for now, I’ve got a few bits and bobs from my recorder that I’ll be posting soon. Thanks for reading!

Hello! I’m back once again, after a bit of a break this time, as I’ve been on holiday in the Lake District for a while. Despite the fact it was meant to be a bit of a break from work, I decided to jump on the opportunities that presented themselves in such a lovely area of the world and record a few bits and bobs. I recently got (huge thanks to Nick Dixon for helping me out) a new recorder, the Tascam DR-100. It’s a cool little machine, nice onboard mics plus the option for two XLR inputs. I decided to spend my holiday getting to grips with it, and experimenting with the unidirectional mics that are built in. I unfortunately haven’t had a chance yet to pick up a rycote for it, so I ran with a foam cover that comes with the unit. It’s not perfect, and some of the recordings suffered with some wind interference, but it’s usable.

I’ll begin with two lots of animals that I was lucky enough to record; some sheep, and some pigs. Weirdly, I found both the sheep and the pigs would vocalise quite nicely, if I vocalised at them. I think they mainly thought I was bringing them food.

They made some cool noises, I managed the captured the sheep incredibly clearly, while the recording of the pigs was more random as I recorded a pen of about 10 of them at once. Below you can hear both the pigs and the sheep, I did a little cleaning with RX on the pigs (as annoyingly a car drove past half way through) but it’s fairly raw, just edited to show the best bits.

I also recorded a fair bit of woodland ambience, and I found a gorgeous spot in the middle of a forest and recorded a bit of the surroundings. The result is a really lovely ambience, with some distant farm animals in too, cows and sheep etc.

Interestingly, I left the record on the tree stump and walked around a little as it recorded, and the result of this are these gorgeous crunchy wood footsteps that have that classic ‘forest’ reverb to them, a subtle yet live sound. Although it’s not common practice to have footsteps in an ambience, and the results probably aren’t mega usable, it still sounds pretty sweet.

I also spent some time on a lovely wooden rowing boat, out on one of the lakes. I did my best to record some rowing, but unfortunately the result isn’t quite what I had imagined. It’s relatively clean, captures the boat, some water and some ambience well, but it’s a little too busy to be really usable.

There’s some considerable wind, that i’ve cleaned a little from the recording, but isn’t totally perfect – but the recording is also just fairly unclear, unfortunately. The sound of waves hitting against the wood of the boat created quite a prominent noise, that sounds a lot like the sound of the oars moving, so the result is a bit messy. I think breaking a rowing boat down into it’s elements would be the best way to design it sound wise, but it was a fun experiment.

I also recorded some cool flowing water, both a gentle stream and a more violent waterfall. The onboard mics handled the water okay, but the heavy presence of white noise in the sounds makes it a bit of a challenge to capture detail well.

The recordings are fairly good, and would work as an element of an ambience. Due to the nature of the source, the sound doesn’t really have a lot of variation, particularly not the waterfall.

And lastly, we climbed a big old mountain thing while in the lake district, and I recorded a bit of ambience at the peak (a mere 900m above sea level!). It looked fantastic, but sadly didn’t sound quite as great as it looked.

It’s largely just wind, and due to my poor wind protection, it’s not the most detailed wind – but it’d probably work as an element of some wind sound design.

That’s the lot for now, thanks very much for reading! I shall returneth very soon with some cool bits and bobs.

Hello! Back again with a fun little recording session that I did with my flatmate a little while ago. We put some money together and decided to buy as much fruit and vegetables as we could lay our hands on, and smash it all up in the name of audio.

We ended up with a hell of a lot of produce:

We bought a mixture of fleshy stuff, more crackly stuff, stuff with harder shells, stuff with more squishy insides. We set up a shotgun mic and a 414, both going into the sound devices 633, and smashed away. The results are cool, lots and lots of very usable smashing and squishing sounds!